Mayor Ed Lee is seen in his SF City Hall office on Friday, Dec. 28, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Mayor Ed Lee is seen in his SF City Hall office on Friday, Dec. 28,...

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Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says the project takes information created using tax dollars and makes it more visible by posting it online.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says the project takes information...

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A health inspection card shows a Manhattan bar has an A grade. Ratings for San Francisco restaurants, based on a numerical scale, will be posted on Yelp under a deal between the review site and the city.

(01-17) 09:47 PST San Francisco -- San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee will announce Thursday that health information for the city's restaurants will soon appear in listings on consumer review site Yelp, as part of an initiative to improve transparency and ultimately food safety.

The news is the latest in an effort under Lee to make government data more accessible. He will make the announcement as part of this week's 81st Winter Conference of Mayors in Washington, where he serves as chairman of the technology and innovation task force.

"We have a lot of information in the hands of government," Lee said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. He wants that information "to go out to the public in ways that they can use it for their benefit."

San Francisco's technology department worked with Yelp's engineering team, in partnership with the city of New York, to create technical standards for restaurant health data that other cities, sites and apps can take advantage of.

So while Thursday's news concerns Yelp, the popular San Francisco review site, other services that provide restaurant listings, like Google, TripAdvisor or CitySearch, could follow suit.

Information on San Francisco restaurants will begin appearing on Yelp Thursday. Data for New York is expected in a few weeks, and health information for Philadelphia is expected soon thereafter.

"We're taking information already created with consumer tax dollars and making it highly visible," said Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of Yelp.

The hope is that making the information more transparent will allow people to make more informed choices about the restaurants they visit, in turn encouraging restaurateurs to raise safety standards and potentially improving overall public health.

In late 1997, Los Angeles County began requiring restaurants to display grade cards from Department of Health Services inspections.

Subsequent studies found that consumers and restaurants both altered their behavior in response. Restaurants that secured A ratings earned 5 percent more revenue than those getting B's, according to a study by Stanford and University of Maryland researchers.

That seems to have encouraged more restaurants to strive for the top rating, as the number of food borne-disease hospitalizations declined by 13.1 percent across the county in the year after the grade cards appeared, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Environmental Health.

The Department of Public Health rates San Francisco restaurants on a 100-point scale. The system, which went into effect in 2005, was a compromise after the restaurant lobby successfully defeated a plan for letter grades posted in windows, as is done in Los Angeles.

The city's restaurants aren't required to post the scores but are required to produce them if asked by a customer. Diners have been able to look them up online, if they manage to find and navigate the city's records.